The best and easiest way to have great NPCs is to inject your old characters. The fighter who settled down and opened
a tavern, school or guild. The cleric who built his own temple.

Another way is to use former player characters who have parted ways and left the group for whatever reason. This way you already have a history and a personality for the NPC.

This is a classic tip because it’s a good one. Do you do it? If not, start.

Another past tip from the ezine advised GMs to get a copy of each PC at every level or each stage of significant improvement. By the time a D&D PC is level 20, you’ve got 20 NPCs. If the player was an optimizer, you’ve got 20 killer NPCs.

Archive both aspects of a PC: crunch and fluff = 3

Ask your players for a copy of their PCs each level. Do this also to handle absentee players so you have a recent version of their character on hand for rulings.

Reuse PCs to build your library of NPCs

With copy in hand or on disc, annotate it with personality details if the player has not already.

Note everything you can think of that defines the PC’s unique presence in the group:

Character demeanor

Behaviours

Quirks

Motives

Favourite sayings

Combined with the stats, you have a wonderful NPC that you not only have details for, but fond memories of to draw upon when roleplaying him.

But wait, there’s more. As a sneaky GM, you will also want to record the character’s best tactics. This is where the crunch (statistics) meet an aspect of fluff (tactics) to give you dangerous NPCs. Note his:

Positioning and movement

Preferred attack types

Ability and feat combos

Tactical equipment use

Spell picks and uses

Skill usage

Add flaws

One thing NPCs can do well that many PCs cannot is show weakness. Nobody is perfect. Players want to be heroes, and unless your game has a flaws system, chances are the PCs show no weaknesses.

You will want to round out PCs converted to NPCs by adding a weakness or two.

Make your favourite a villain

Like parents, game masters do not want to admit they have a favourite character in their campaigns. But we do. Good GMs will ensure no preferential treatment is given. Great GMs will try to bring out the best in the other PCs. However, that one PC makes you laugh that little bit extra, or cause you to lean forward a couple inches more when he acts.

Pay homage to these PCs by turning them into villains in your future campaigns. There are many ways to turn a good PC into a menace:

Make them evil

Change their philosophy to “the end justifies the means”

Give them a dilemma that forces them to make horrible choices

Bite them with a vampire

Give them an alignment changing or cursed magic item

Submit PCs to community sites

Pay it forward by adding these pre-built great characters to community sites to share with other GMs and help them populate their campaigns. I know of a couple sites where you can do this. If you know of others, drop us a comment:

4th edition builds NPC’s much differently than PC’s. The system is not designed to handle NPC’s build like PC’s, probably due to things like daily powers (which the PC’s routinely expend, and the NPC’s would always have in full supply if they didn’t fight that day).

That is one of the big complaints about 4e, PC’s and NPC’s are different, so what one has cannot be given to the other without homebrewing. PC’s cannot become werewolves, vampires, etc. Basically anything that is an acquired template and/or would give an LA in 3.5 is no longer available to the PC’s. And in the few cases when a PC becomes a vampire for example, it specifies that the character becomes an NPC. On the other hand, NPC’s don’t get daily powers and have much fewer powers in general.

I never had much luck crossing over between PCs and NPCs anyway. PCs have giant piles of magic items and abilities and animal companion stats — imagine looking through a four-page character sheet for each NPC in a combat.

Meanwhile, I run Goodman Games modules and they tend to have really wild NPCs like werebadger ranger/rogue or zombie grigs, so even though I have the statblocks on 3×5 cards I never seem to pull one out.

[…] Former PCs as NPCs I love this concept! I’ve used it quite a bit in the past, and I’m about to do it again in a campaign that starts this weekend. I’m taking PCs from a past campaign, turning them into NPCs for this game and running with them. I can’t wait to do it to see how it goes. The PCs were from a very long running campaign, so I know them well. This should help add more life to the game. […]